Fans of Valve's groundbreaking FPS franchise, Half-Life, have taken to the net en masse to voice their frustration regarding a lack of information on the series' next installment, Half-Life 3.
Seven years or so have passed since Half Life 2 hit shelves for the PC. Ever since, the gaming world has sat patiently holding its …

Frothing with rage

HL3 = HL2.3

I suspect they've dug themselves into a hole, plot-wise, and marketing-wise.

How do you offer an episode 3, then offer a brand new game afterwards? Episode 3 should be the conclusion, but how do you charge full price for what is essentially a dot release? And if HL 2.3 is not the conclusion plot-wise, will there be enough story-line left for a brand new HL3 rleease? And how do you avoid the Duke Nukem Forever syndrome?

HL 2.3 - yes please

What a stupid petition

Valve are most likely working on HL3 so some petition is not going to alter their plans one jot. It'll come when it's ready. Maybe fans of the series should calm down and check out some other games in the meantime.

I liked HL2. It was a highly polished shooter with a somewhat interesting story, but I don't get where the adulation is coming from. I thought Portal / Portal 2 had a far better plot and script and was technically part of the same "universe" as HL.

Dated

I haven't downvoted you, but I imagine many people rightly will. Of course HL2 is "dated"! It's bloody 8 years old now. Feet were an absence from most FPS games until quite recently - Crysis being the first example I can think of. Far Cry (released after HL2) didn't have them either, where hands had only just progressed to being on guns (and were part of the gun model itself)

The "importance" of it that you quote isn't seminal in HL2 either. A silent protagonist with health pickups you say? Sounds very much like you can trace the all the way back to Wolvenstein. I'm not sure why you draw parallels to ID and say Gordon Freeman is representative of that - HL2 had bugger all to do with ID. Your equivalent of Sonic or Mario is either Bitterman, Doom Guy/Marine or B.J. Blazkowicz.

Feet & hands

So you can't see Gordon's feet when you look down, or his hands when he's driving a buggy or the swamp boat. Personally I've never wished I could see those things, and rather than adding such frankly pointless touches to the game I'd prefer a game that plays brilliantly well and is fast.

Re Peter Lee

Hands on the wheel

More stuff to animate & chuck around on the screen though, isn't it? And would it really add anything to the experience? I love the "Half Life" (and "Portal") games to bits, but I've never played them and though "ah, I wish I had feet and could see my hands on the steering wheel." Give me a great game rather than unnecessary visual fluff anytime.

BTW In the "Portal" games the only times you ever really see your feet are when you look through one portal and can see yourself vanishing into another, such as if you create two in a corner.

@Annihilator

In fairness, Source/HL2 also got many engine patches, including HDR, and continues to. There was also Lost Coast, and the fact that Source could run on surprisingly crap machines.

That, and Far Cry just wasn't as involving. I played it, and I really liked it at first, then halfway through I got inexplicably bored (probably around the time the cliché scientist released his cliché experiments). Crytek games are like Serious Sam games to me - I can't get involved with a tech demo.

HL2 got praised for more than the engine and how good the graphics were or weren't, and rightly so. I'd rather play Deus Ex 1 with graphics that look like arse than Halo 4 with spandangly effects, any day of the week.

@MJI

People do get it that it's a good game, they just don't know why you even had to criticize parts of the game that were irrelevant, especially at the time it was released. It's like saying Quake is a great game, shame there wasn't any anisotropic filtering.

@Annililator

Valve

I thought Valve had decided to move wholesale into game publishing via Steam rather than dirty their hands with coding nowadays. Even things like Portal were made by teams purchased by the company, from what I understand?

It would be fair to say that all of Valve's recent mega-hits (Portal 1 & 2, L4D 1 & 2, Team Fortress) had their genesis in brains which didn't originally work for the company, but they now work for Valve, so they're as much a product of that culture as Half-Life or HL2.

I'm sure HL3 is heavily in development right now, and has been, in some for or other, for years. A bit like Blizzard, Valve have a habit of tossing everything out and starting again when the direction they've taken isn't working.

If you can see the future,

And the second part of HL1 was not nearly as good as the first part! When I play Half-Life, as I still do from time to time, I always end the game at the point that I get to Xen. On the other hand, I can play both Half -Life: Blue Shift and Half -Life: Opposing Force all the way through. (Both of these are very underrated, by the way. )

Given I can see the future

Xen

That - and "Anomalous Materials" (I think) - were the points where "Half Life" decided to turn into "Jet Set Willy" and was ruined for me. Still a great game, but when the designers decided that a great challenge would be to make the player jump from flying manta ray to flying manta ray until you reach a small green light in the sky was when it all fell apart. The only part of "Half Life 2" that I found a bit bobbins was the "Sandtraps" level where you find yourself dragging mattresses and planks across a beach in order to avoid the antlions.